Our family flew with Etihad in 2010 and was surprised by the wonderful experience and excellent customer service. When it came to booking the next flight to India for my husband, the only airline we looked at was Etihad. I should have looked at others!!!
It started with the booking which was a nightmare. It took over 2 hours to book the ticket through the Etihad US website. I attempted to purchase the ticket 6 times before my transaction was finally processed. I contacted the ticketing center at Etihad while I was attempting to purchase the ticket and the agent walked me through the process online three of the six times. He had no explanation for why I was having so many issues.
I had to contact my credit card company after each failure to make sure that the transaction did not go through and found out each time that no attempt to submit a payment had been made. When the purchase was finally made I was relieved and done.
I was surprised to find on my credit card statement that I was assessed an international transaction fee because my credit card was routed through Abu Dhabi not within the United States. At no time during my 30 minute conversation with the ticketing agent or on the website did it state that the payment was being processed outside the US.M
y next surprise came when 6 days before my husband's departure I reviewed the email I received to see that the title was listed as Ms. instead of Mr. Thinking this would just be a minor correction and not a big deal, I went online to find the customer service number. I contacted the Chicago ticketing office number to only be place on hold for 20 minutes and end up speaking with someone in Mumbai India.
I explained to the sales agent that I had great difficulty booking the ticket and just now reviewed the email that was sent to me and found an error with the title. I asked if he could please change the title from Ms. to Mr. He stated that he could, but asked if I would hold for one minute. When he returned to the line I received a shock. He stated that I would need to pay $75.00 US dollars to change the name on the booking.
I asked if he as joking. He stated that it was company policy to charge the customer a fee. I asked him why I was being charged such an outrageous fee to change one letter. I explained that I was not changing the name just changing the title from Ms. to Mr.
He said that the policy was for security reasons and that if I wished to make the change I would be required to pay the fee. I explained to the agent the difficulties I had while attempting to book the original flight and asked if there was anyway the fee could be waived.
He stated again that it was the policy of Etihad to charge the customer the fee when any change the name was being made. I ended up speaking with three additional supervisors and all provided the same excuses - company policy, security, or processing fee. All excuses are total lies.
For security reasons the name should be correct and it was just the title was off my one letter, company policies are meant to be adjusted on a case per case basis, and a processing fee for sending a free email to me for an e-ticket is bogus.
So Etihad cares more about collecting money than being fair to the customer. We do not plan on flying this airline again.
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